| Introduction |
 |
| |
"...all Western philosophy is Platonism. Metaphysics,
Idealism, and Platonism mean essentially the same thing... Plato
has become the prototypal philosopher"1 |
|
Since Heidegger's portentous pronouncement,
'Platonism' has come to stand for all of the 'totalizing',
'logocentric' metaphysics which would reduce otherness to
sameness and imagine itself to have achieved the Absolute
Identity of Thought and Being. 'Platonism', according to this
now standard, post-modern doxa, denotes hyperbolic,
even hypertrophic pretensions of self-empowerment and self-deification
- pretensions which, however submerged, have supposedly acted
as the real dynamic driving the logos on its long odyssey.
Thus Plato's thought is now seen as the Absolute speculative
Identity in its infancy, Hegel's as the sublation of this
origin and so the entire totalizing process completed and
concluded: the circle of logocentric metaphysics - of 'Platonism',
that is - takes us from ancient Athenian Alpha to German Idealist
Omega. As Stanley Rosen puts it,
|
| |
[w]ith its claim to the accessibility of complete knowledge
of the principles of formation-process, as well as to knowledge
of the entire structure of the Absolute as product, Hegelianism
is nothing but a hyper-Platonism when seen from a Heideggerian
or post-Heideggerian standpoint. From Plato to Hegel we see
the history of metaphysics as the misdirected attempt, or the
false claim, to acquire eternal knowledge of eternity, including
the limit-case in which eternity is perpetual circular motion.2 |
|
Finis coronat opus: in the beginning,
ancient Platonism; in the end, German Idealism.
|
| In all of this, of course, the Heideggerian account
of 'Platonism' is a kind of mirror-image of Hegel's self-serving
narrative of Western thought: just as Hegel situates himself
within the lineage of a) Parmenides's primal Identity
of Thought and Being, b) the later Plato's synthesis,
via the metaphysical taxonomy of the Sophist and
Parmenides, of apparent opposites, and c) neo-Platonism's
blueprint for self-thinking Substance - Nous as the 'All
in All' - so 'Heideggerianist' thought accepts, by and large,
this Hegelian reading. Thus it not so much that the veracity
of Hegel's history is questioned, it is more that the positive
evaluation of the Hegelian history is gainsaid. There is, it
would seem, no doubt about the composition, intention or dynamic
of this 'Platonism'. Nor is there much disputing that Hegelianism
'merely' brings to a head what was always implicit and immanent,
always somehow 'there'. What has changed is that the achievement
of 'Platonism' is no longer seen as an achievement - or, rather,
it is now seen in wholly negative terms, as the absolutizing
of wilful subjectivity, the violent disregard for and denial
of thought's 'Other', and hence the triumph of 'onto-theo-logocentrism'.3 |
| My thesis is that this now popular account of
'Platonism' is gravely mistaken. Platonism, as I shall seek
to define it here, is corrigible, self-critical and ultimately
bereft of Absolute Idealist pretensions. Platonism, I shall
argue, is always aware of the limits of logos,
and is thus in no sense some Hegelian exaltation of reason.
Put simply, Platonism is not merely nascent Hegelianism. |
| To be more precise, the Platonism I seek to recover
here (following the fruitful suggestions of Pierre and Illsetraut
Hadot4) is
a spiritually-directed, 'religious' philosophy which, although
never anti-rational, realizes that its source and its 'goal'
is, qua spiritual, beyond the grasp of correlational,
discursive thought: Platonism, on my account, is - contra
Hegel - not the Absolute revealed, but rather the revelation
of our shortcomings vis-ŕ-vis the Absolute; it is not
logos-centred, but rather the realization that its divine
goal is always beyond logos. Platonism - according to
my argument - remains aware that its telos is always
beyond any metaphysical structure, beyond Being, epekeina
tes ousias; given this supra-rational, divine goal, the
unifying and regulating order of the Platonic logos is
never accorded Absolute supremacy but, instead, is forever falling
short, forever undermined. Platonism, seen in this context,
is revealed as an open-ended Way, in which logos can
never be adequate to a divine Other continually resisting rational
assemblage, completion or 'totalization'. |
| I shall argue that it is precisely this critical
reserve regarding the 'highest point' that distinguishes ancient
Platonism from so much of modernity: where Platonism's 'principle
of constitutive incompletion' (that is, its recognition that
the condition and end of thought is itself beyond thought) ensures
against any distension or absolutization of logos, modernity's
increasingly orotund confidence in the power and scope of reason
leads to the eventual triumph of 'onto-theo-logic', the deification
of volitional Begrifflichkeit and mocking of any Jenseits,
any supposed limit to ratiocinative power. So much of modernity's
self-assertion is, I therefore suggest, the contrary
(rather than completion) of Platonism. Accordingly, after rescuing
ancient Platonism from fanciful misconceptions (whether Hegelian
or Heideggerian), I shall then explicate the way in which modernity's
apparent Absolute culmination, with Hegel, represents, not so
much the consummation (der Vollzug) of Platonism, but
instead the consummation of a denial or denegation of
Platonism. |
| But I attempt more than this. Although I contest
the notion that 'Hegel = Plato', that Hegelian gigantism is
the crowning achievement in the history of 'Platonism', I shall
also suggest that Platonism (as I understand it) does
assume a distinctly modern (and still relevant) configuration
- not in Hegel's thought, but in German Idealism's immanent
self-critique. Thus, after presenting Hegelian Idealism as Platonism's
antitype, I suggest, finally, that - with his insistence on
a God beyond metaphysical categories and his critique of anthropomorphic
Idealism's attempts at self-grounding (and thus auto-apotheosis)
- it is the later Schelling, not Hegel, who should be
seen as the modern instantiation of Platonism. |
| Treating the terms 'Identity' and 'Difference'
as the nucleolus around which this entire investigation centres,
what I shall show is that, where the Hegelian 'Identity of Identity
and Difference' would claim to contain All that is within the
conceptual, categorial schema of Absolute Idealism, Platonism
- as I define it - represents the forcing of the 'metaphysics
of Identity' (that is, the structuring, ordering power of the
logos) into ceaseless self-revision by the 'poetics of
difference' (that is, the rupturing, 'decentering' power of
the divine muthos).5
The Platonic logos, I argue here, should be understood
as a limited means to a spiritual goal; it is never an
end in itself. Platonism, one could say, remains aware of the
'finitude of all epistemes'. |
| To be sure, this 'other' element in ancient Platonism
- the supra-rational, beyond Being - is well recognized in a
certain strain of post-Heideggerian thought: Levinas, as we
shall see, is quite explicit in (and deserves due credit for)
his creative appropriation of Platonism's stress upon a radically
transcendent, non-assimilable divinity, the Divine beyond every
ontology, par delŕ toute ontologie, au-delŕ de l'essence.
(Derrida, although he will follow Levinas in accepting this
'other side' to Plato, ultimately confirms and underlines a
more 'truly Hegelian' version of Plato: for Derrida, the 'Alterior'
moment within Plato's thought, the muthos which accompanies
Plato's logos, is merely the minor element in an overall
dialectic which sees nascent Identity-thinking ultimately reign
supreme; the Hegelian Plato is thus made hyper-emphatic.6)
Nevertheless, by assuming that this 'Other' Platonism exits
in contradistinction and opposition to logos-Platonism,7
Levinas reveals himself as an inverted (or negative) Hegelian,
and thus as trapped within Hegel's orbit: just as Hegel fails
to see the 'Beyond' - Jenseits, in his pejorative term
- as the supra-intellectual goal of Platonic logos (a
goal which always prevents any inflated rationalism), so Levinas
fails to see how the divine telos never implies the dismissal
or utter rejection of logos but is, instead, a crucial
although partial element of the Platonic Way.8
|
| My first task, therefore, shall consist of examining
these apparently opposing 'currents' (Platonism as, alternatively,
the "metaphysics of identity" and the "poetics of difference",
as proto-Hegelianism and proto-deconstruction), only to reject
the bifurcation each entails: there are not two Platonisms,
I argue, only one - a corrigible and 'finite' logos forever
doubting and revising itself, geared towards a divinity which
remains inaccessible to metaphysics alone. To establish this
point, I 'introduce' my consideration of Plato's Way by means
of a shorter consideration of Plato's main ancient successor,
Plotinus: going against chronology allows us to examine a more
systematic version of Platonism, a more structured and stratified
account which puts in sharper focus the nature of its own source. |
| Having established this non-Hegelian understanding
of ancient Platonism, I then present the dénouement of
Hegelian Idealism itself, precisely in order to expose it as
a distortion and, indeed, desertion of Platonism: after showing
how his logical and ontological treatment of Identity and Difference
is what distinguishes Hegel's Idealism as 'leaving hesitation
behind' and, supposedly, achieving Absolute self-certainty (the
fullness of Spirit qua the fullness of 'subject-ness'),
I then argue, following the work of Jacques Taminiaux, that
Hegel's wilful overcoming of Difference shows him to be more
Hobbesian than Platonic, and hence his renowned 'fusion' of
the ancient and the modern to be a very one-sided affair. |
| To be more precise, I present - after establishing
a non-Hegelian understanding of Plato - an account of German
Idealism's wider development, concentrating on the young Schelling
as well as the mature Hegel. This background is crucial not
just for understanding Hegelianism, but also for understanding
the later Schelling's critique of Hegel and reinstatement
of Platonic 'constitutive incompletion'. For, as we shall see,
the mature Schelling - expanding dramatically the latent element
of finitude in his earlier thought - comes to realize that discursive
thought depends, logically and ontologically, upon a non-discursive
'basis', the Das beneath or behind all possible conceptualization.
For Schelling, there is no suggestion that Thought can 'contain'
Being. Instead, there is a recognition of how Thought depends
upon Being, how self-reflective logos can never claim
'total' understanding, how there can be no 'Identity of Identity
and Difference'. More than this, though, the later Schelling
recognizes the Idealist and idolatrous problems with even this
suggestion: the Being he speaks of remains conceptual,
it remains at the level of Thought. The ineffable 'basis' of
all that is, however, must be other than conceptual. Schelling's
God, therefore, is above and beyond Being, 'over' (über)
Being. In short, Schelling presents a modern articulation of
Platonism's critical reserve regarding 'total 'explanation,
a reinstatement, that is, of the notion of a divinity epekeina
tes ousias. The Absolute pretensions of modernity are thus
burst asunder at the very moment they seem to have reached their
tumultuous subjective summit. Man, Schelling reminds us, is
not the measure of all. |
| My 'redemptive criticism' of Platonism, then,
stands opposed to both Hegel's 'history' and its inversion,
the Heideggerian reading: in both cases we find a blindness
to the nuances, the unevenness and subtleties of the so-called
'Platonic Tradition'. Both accounts, I shall argue, expose themselves
as sclerotic and 'totalizing', and, ultimately, as a violation
of the logos. By contrast, I hope that my account of
Platonism offers, if not solutions, then at least a Way by which
we might avoid the respective aporiai of both the Absolute 'rationalistic'
pretensions of Hegelianism and the anti-rational, self-contradictory
iconoclasm of so much Heideggerianism. |
| Footnotes |
Up | Down | Top | Bottom |
|
